Ian Badcoe
Since you ask about my gender.
My gender is a hyper-intelligent shade of the colour blue...
or pink, it doesn’t really matter.
My gender is a hurricane filled with planes filled with
sharks filled with snakes.
My gender is a critical theory of why you suck.
My gender is genetically enhanced muscle fibre on a
titanium steel frame.
My gender neither has, nor gives, a flying fuck at a
doughnut.
My gender is a doughnut, a five-dimensional doughnut
embedded in three-dimensional space—most of it
outside your limited perception.
Traditional dress for my gender is an eight-foot armour suit
with power-assist, accessorized with a sword you
could use to cut up battleships.
My gender is a secret.
My gender is a curse... just like everybody else’s.
My gender is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a
blessing wrapped in a social construct wrapped in
defective legislation wrapped in tissue paper with
“just biology” written on it in badly spelled crayon.
My gender is a mess.
My gender is none of your business.
My gender is 327ᵗʰ in the queue to be served.
My gender has been weaponized.
My gender is angry.
My gender sees this world through a glass clearly, stands
ready with a box of sticky labels that all say ‘idiot.’
Again, my gender is angry.
My gender wishes for the eight-foot suit of power armour.
Because if you have hurt any of my gender’s friends...
My gender is part man, part machine, part woman and part
nameless horror from outside this little island of
sanity you like to call ‘real’.
If you have hurt my friends...
Once more my gender is angry...
If you have hurt them...
My gender was built by Cyberdyne Systems, model: G800.
It wasn’t intended to end the world, but...
If you have...
My gender clenches its fists, their fists, my fists.
Listen, and understand! My gender is out there!
It can’t be bargained with.
It can’t be reasoned with.
It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear!
And it absolutely
will
not
stop.
Making out with Proteus
And when our lips meet, his face unfolds
not à la Hellraiser or Resident Evil
but more like topology, mathematical;
an object that, rotating, shows
where I thought it simple, I was wrong...
...it seems we’re every one of us a world, cityscape, a throng,
a crowd scene filmed in Technicolor and
just as I think I have absorbed that one
there folds out of the multitude a female face.
And I kiss that too.
I’m taller and she tilts her head,
there’s just a touch of breath across my lips,
before they brush on hers. There is no rush,
but when I pull back, wanting to see her eyes,
she winks
and then her whole body unfolds.
And I half fall, and step, but now I’m walking
through her... him... them... the plurality/
ambiguity meaning nothing, in this unplaced untime place
and they are still unfolding all around
and I’m walking through their whole world now:
through an office, where a Bakelite telephone rings,
between faded dark green curtains onto
a late-night street with distant drunken singing,
towards the only open place: a coffee shop
and as I go I feel the ghosts of kisses,
punches, traffic accidents, hands on zips, caresses
the flash of lust,
—or possibly tactical nukes—
and the glass in front of me explodes
the world goes dark
and the spinning fragments form a field of stars
so vast and deep and hungry now I know
that this is perfect love for me
a warm heart-shaped infinity, not limited
to any single name, identity or gender,
not always tender, not even always undoomed,
but although infinities can come in different sizes,
my subset of the multiverse is precisely
the same size as the whole. I can choose,
if I wish, only to live the lives
where I’m with this lover,
and infinity again, is just as large
after this dissection.
It is the working of affection
to compute the intersection
of every possible world where there’s a you
with every world where there’s a me
and love the result
and if I take one more step,
I can kiss the stars.
Ian Badcoe is a nonbinary poet living in Sheffield. He writes poems exploring the spaces between gender, progressive politics, science, technology and fiction--especially science fiction. He has a long-term songwriting collaboration with German Indie Singer/Composer Hallam London and they quite recently released the album they had been working on for the last decade... He is a regular figure at local open mics and has been published in: Celebrating Change; Selcouth Station; Corporeal; En*gendered; Streetcake; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Snakeskin; and some other places. In the daytime he works in game development, which is both more and less exciting than you probably think...